Verismo

By the time Vickie Lynn Hogan was twenty-six, she had made a name for herself, having modelled for Guess jeans and appeared on the cover of Playboy. The name was Anna Nicole Smith. A native of Houston, Texas, Smith worked at a fried-chicken restaurant (the cook became her first husband) and a strip club before marrying her second husband, the eighty-nine-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II, in 1994. The marriage, and the legal wrangling over Marshall’s estate after his death, earned Smith a quintessentially modern kind of fame: untethered to talent, buoyed by reality television, burnished by tragedy. She died, in 2007, of a prescription-drug overdose. Her idol was Marilyn Monroe.

To Richard Thomas, a native of Birmingham, England, she was closer to Madame Butterfly. Thomas is the librettist of “Anna Nicole,” an opera based on Smith’s life, with music by Mark-Anthony Turnage. It premièred at Covent Garden, in 2011, and opens this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a co-production with New York City Opera. The show, which falls somewhere between cheeky and epic (the BAM production has an ensemble of sixty-five and an orchestra of fifty-nine), recasts its subject as the archetypal fallen woman, in the tradition of “Tosca” and “Lucia di Lammermoor.” (The conductor, Steven Sloane, calls it “an extension of verismo style.”) “If you put her narrative in nineteenth-century Versailles and call her the Baroness de Anna—with the old husband and the love triangle and families feuding over fortunes—it’s a classic tale,” Thomas said the other day, at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. “It’s just acted out in the Hollywood Hills, where there’s not quite so much French.”

Thomas, who is forty-eight, bespectacled, and tightly wound, came to prominence with “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” which was a hit in the West End and played Carnegie Hall in 2008. “I’ve always been drawn to what you’d call Americana,” he explained. “When I was eleven, I heard ‘Kind of Blue,’ by Miles Davis, and it changed my life.” Thomas picked up his love of opera from his mother, a Wagner enthusiast. For a while, he performed in a musical double act, until his partner had a nervous breakdown. He recalled the moment, in 2000, when he was watching a late-night rerun of “The Jerry Springer Show” in his London flat and became interested in its dramaturgical possibilities. “All these individuals were screaming at each other—it was, like, beep beep beep beep—and I was getting annoyed that I couldn’t hear the vernacular.” (He also considered adapting “Judge Judy.”)

While researching “Anna Nicole,” Thomas flew to Los Angeles to interview Smith’s dress designers, Pol’ Atteu and Patrik Simpson, and visited strip clubs in Las Vegas, where he learned the legalities of topless bars. (“The law expressly says: panties must be kept on.”) He came to sympathize with his subject. “There must have been some kind of shock at the level of fame she achieved,” he said. He was struck by Smith’s devotion to her son, Daniel, who died in the Bahamas, in 2006, and by the back pain she incurred from her breast implants, which probably exacerbated her pill addiction. “I wanted to give her the benefit of every doubt.”

Thomas rode an elevator down to a rehearsal studio, where the cast was finishing up a scene between Smith, played by the soprano Sarah Joy Miller (she recently sang the role of Violetta, in “La Traviata,” at Palm Beach Opera), and her lawyer, Howard K. Stern, played by the baritone Rod Gilfry (Don Giovanni, Aix-en-Provence). Afterward, the singers gathered around a television showing an episode of “The Anna Nicole Show”—Smith’s dog was humping a Teddy bear—while Thomas met with Sloane, the conductor.

“This is bizarre in English: sti-let-tos, on the triplet,” Sloane said, flipping through sheet music.

“It’s like a moment of anger,” Thomas instructed. “Bah-bah-bah!”

The singers moved on to a scene in which Smith, still a struggling exotic dancer, visits a plastic surgeon, sung by the tenor Richard Troxell (Don José, Teatro Petruzzelli).

DOCTOR: This is my mantra, this is my chant: Fight time and nature with a silicone implant.

ANNA: I don’t know, I just don’t know. . . . O.K., I’ll take the tits. But let’s start small.

DOCTOR: If you start small, why bother at all?

ANNA: Oh, whatever—supersize me!

On a break, Miller compared her role to Massenet’s Manon, “who was basically a gold-digger.” Her favorite passage is an aria that Anna Nicole sings after she gets the implants. “I can open up into the higher part of my soprano voice,” Miller said. “She says, ‘This is my time, / my tiiiime!’ ” The note, unlike the protagonist, is a B natural. ♦

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